In-Character Let's Play

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When most people do a Let's Play, they usually do it as themselves. No acting, no work of fiction. They are just playing a game and providing commentary on it. However, there are some people who decide to pretend to be somebody else for their let's play.

Not the characters in the game they are playing, but characters completely unrelated to the game. While a regular Let's Play is made as an entertaining walkthrough to the game, these kinds of Let's Plays are almost purely made for entertainment.

As such, these people will often goof around and pretending not to know how to play. Sometimes though, they will take gameplay seriously while keeping in character of whoever they are pretending to be. These kinds of Let's Plays don't finish the games they are playing very often with each game being played as a one shot. Some games do get played to completion like a normal Let's Play, but the focus is mostly to entertain by showing what it would be like if certain fictional characters played video games.

That being said, some of these still have the gameplay and voices recorded simultaneously, so there is often a big chance of the actors unintentionally but noticeably breaking character.

See also Virtual YouTubers, dedicated streamers/content creators who depict themselves with an animated Digital Avatar with varying degrees of Kayfabe, which also features some overlap with this trope. Compare with "Let's Watch Our Show" Plot and MST, where characters watch or read a piece of media and react to it.

Examples:

• Believe it or not, The Annoying Orange has a gaming channel which features the cast of the series playing games as their respective characters.
• On Das Sporking member Silais' sporks of Chrono Cross and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (the latter hosted on his own blog) are framed as if the games are being played by the casts of Neptunia and Breath of Fire respectively.
• EthGoesBOOM is, to quote his YouTube channel, "a gaming YouTuber guy who makes silly voices". He dedicates a majority of his videos putting on different voices, acting as the various animatronics from Five Nights at Freddy's, playing games and reacting to videos. Sometimes said videos even devolve into their own Story Arcs that can span throught several episodes.
• Homestar Runner:
  • The episode "Videlectrix - Halloween Waggle" has the two employees of the fictional company Videlectrix stumble their way through the Atari game Haunted House.
  • The series "Disk 4 of 12" features strong Bad doing lets plays of games that appeared as floppy disks throughout Strong Bad Email.
• Kizuna Ai is a Virtual YouTuber known for writing blogs and doing Let's Plays. Little to nothing is known about the team that created her and the person who provides her voice.
• Let's Play Pokémon White (MageKnight404) has Raymond Soto roleplaying as both an exaggerated version of himself and as the game's protagonist, with the former being a Spirit Advisor explaining to the latter how Pokémon battles work and reinterpreting the story that way. The character of Hilda is eventually given a designated voice actress.
• Marik Plays Bloodlines, a spin-off of Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series, in which LittleKuriboh plays Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines in-character as Marik from Yu-Gi-Oh!, with occasional interjections from Bakura from the same.
• A YouTuber going by "The Nerd Gamer" is sporadically releasing episodes of a Republic: The Revolution LP, where he both plays and talks in-character as a suitably ideologized pro-Communist party leader the entire time.
• The Nostalgia Critic: In one episode, The Nostalgia Critic (in character, not as Doug Walker) decides to do a Let's Play of Bart's Nightmare after getting requests to do more video games.
• Sans Gaming exists primarily to mock a popular belief within the Undertale fandom that Sans the Skeleton would make a very entertaining YouTube Let's Player if he existed in real life. That said, Sans Gaming Subverts and Parodies the trope: despite looking like a real Lets Play channel owned by Sans, the uploads consist solely of bizarre and random memes that often have very little relation to him, much less gaming.
• Stephen Georg's Ninten Speaks channel had a 55 episode "Ninten plays Minecraft" series. The channel involved him dressing, acting as, and speaking about various topics as his version of Ninten from EarthBound Beginnings that he voice acted in Starmen.net's radio play Loids are not Christmas.
• Two Best Friends Play was this in the early years. Their videos involved Matt and Pat playing exaggerated versions of themselves, with lots of scripted jokes and heavy editing. (And for some reason, they pretended to be Americans and tried to hide that they were actually Canadians.) After they started doing multi-episode, full game LP's, they dropped the fictional personas and just played as themselves.
• Two Saiyans Play: The franchise started with Takahata and Lanipator from TeamFourStar as Nappa and Vegeta playing video games. It later had spin-offs with Lani also voicing Krillin and MasakoX voicing Goku.
• Vannamelon has a series of Let's Plays where she roleplays as Fluttershy from My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic.
• Glove and Boots had a (sadly now inactive) seperate gaming channel where puppeteers Damien Eckhardt-Jacobi and Vincent Bova livestream games as their characters Mario^note  No, not that Mario and Fafa.
• Cartoon Network uploaded short YouTube videos of Steven Universe characters playing Save the Light: Peridot, Pearl and Amethyst, and even Onion.
• Joel Haver did a livestream speedrun of Dark Souls III, in-character as Caleb, a small-town dudebro from a few prior videos. A bit later, Caleb did a followup livestream of Elden Ring.
• Stampylongnose became this in his Stampy's Lovely World series after he made the switch from mature to family-friendly content. He became more involved with the Stampy Cat character and even made narratives around his helpers, dogs and the evil villain Hit the Target.
• Weegeepie is a Defictionalization of a YouTube let's play channel owned by Luigi as depicted in Supermarioglitchy4's Super Mario 64 Bloopers, and thus features Luigi playing various video games. This style of video was eventually adopted by SMG4 itself in the SMG4 Crew series.

Examples where the game is also fictional:

• Final Deployment 4: Queen Battle Walkthrough starts with Blair Trigger doing a let's play of the title game. The film exaggerates the premise by revealing his player character can record a let's play of a fictional game in his universe, and that character can record a let's play of a game in their universe, and so on for up to 7 layers of fictional walkthroughs (including a layer where one of the characters is playing as Blair).
• Petscop is a let's play of a fictional game known as Petscop by a character known as Paul.
  • Household Felony is a let's play inspired by Petscop where Richard finds and plays an abandoned PlayStation game.
  • Sheriff Domestic is a parody of Petscop where the character Ed decides to play and document a bizarre fictional game.
• replaying undertale is a let's play of a buggy, Stylistic Suck version of Undertale where the player attempts to find alternate pathways around because battles crash the game.
• Sonic the Hedgehog 2: Special Edition is an LP by Docfuture of another game that doesn't exist, allegedly an upgraded port of Sonic the Hedgehog 2 to the Sega CD 32X. This one parodies Let's Plays as a genre, the Sonic fandom, and the Easter Egg hunting and conspiracy theories surrounding the real Sonic 2 in particular.